Jim Wendler is an accomplished powerlifter who was schooled, beaten up and bloodied, and "graduated with honors" from Westside. His best lifts include a 1000-pound squat, a 675-pound bench press, and a 700-pound deadlift – a 2375 total in the 275 lbs. class. That's right, inhuman strength.
Perhaps unlike his mentors and peers, Wendler applies a more streamlined, "get in and get out" mentality to his workouts. This mindset gave birth to his book, "5/3/1: The Simplest and Most Effective Training System for Raw Strength." It currently ranks as one of the most popular lifting systems ever developed.
When this former Division 1 college athlete isn't getting a new tattoo, riding his motorcycle, or tending to his offspring, he's dishing out often-caustic but-oh-so-true information and advice about lifting. He is, above all, 100% his own man.
I've found that giving people simple training templates makes their training (and really, my training) easier to program.
The problem is that training templates, for the most part, are too rigid and really only take a snapshot of a training session and even with the best intentions, don't allow for enough flexibility to account for daily ups-and-downs and training goals.
What I've done in response is make a very basic training template that anyone can do, regardless of what program they're on or what their goals are.
The template above covers the basics of training – strength, mobility/flexibility and conditioning. Whatever your goals are for your training, this template can easily be followed.
Let's say that strength or hypertrophy is your main goal. If that's the case, you'll still need to incorporate stretching/mobility in your training, so you keep that in.
The strength portion of training will be your emphasis (or you'll raise the volume of assistance work if you want to get bigger as well as stronger) and the conditioning will take a back seat. Now "back seat" doesn't mean that you eliminate it; it means that you do only what's necessary to keep your conditioning level appropriate to your goals.
Now if you're lacking in the mobility department, more time and care will be given to the first part of the template, and you can easily take a few exercises off the assistance work to keep training time to a minimum. Conditioning, again, will be performed only to maintain your status quo and won't be a huge priority. But do NOT cut it out.
Now if conditioning is your weakness, you'll still stretch and do mobility work, but you don't need to spend all day on it as if it were a weakness. The strength-training portion would be cut down to make up for the energy and time that you devote to your conditioning. Training maxes would be cut down and your conditioning work would occupy most of your training and recovery time.
The key to remember in all of this is to have one of these things be a priority for you, not all three.
The definition of overtraining is when three things are emphasized. When everything becomes important, nothing gets done correctly. So pick an area you need to work on, figure out what you need to do, and make the necessary cuts to the other two areas.
Now within each of the three areas, we can break it down further.
* For a description of Jim's 5/3/1 program, click here.
Conditioning Template Notes:
Strength Template Notes:
Editor's Note: DeFranco's "Agile Eight" consists of the following moves:
Hypertrophy Template Notes:
This is nothing ground breaking here, but using this template gives you a simple, basic structure to keep your training and your goals intact.
These three things (stretch/lift/sprint) will always keep you and your training goals in sight. When you lose sight and get off track, remember the template and think of it as a map to where you want to go.
Training is hard work but it's simple hard work that's always the best. Don't be swayed by the newest trends or fads as stretching, squatting, and running will never go out of style.
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